When I was at the port of San Luis Obispo, in the bark Louisa,
in the year 1831, the mission of that name was wealthy, with sixty thousand
head of cattle and thousands of sheep and horses. The great wealth of the
missions, while under Spanish and Mexican control, in cattle, horses and
sheep, will be shown by the following enumeration of their livestock before
and after their secularization—before and after the year 1830.

Mission Sonoma: 30,000 cattle and 1,000 horses and mares. The stock
on the Rancho Suscol before mentioned belonged to the mission.

Mission of Santa Clara: 65,000 cattle, 30,000 sheep and 4,000 horses
and mares. Mentioning this mission recalls to my mind a transaction in
hides and tallow with Fathers Mercado and Muro in my earlier dealings with
them in September, 1844, which showed that the missions acted in unison
with each other. I received from Father Mercado of the Santa Clara mission
a letter to Father Muro of Mission San José requesting him to deliver
to me two hundred hides, which he did, as part payment for some goods I
had sold the former. I had not pressed the matter at all; but he said it
was the same as if he had paid for them himself

Mission San Juan Bautista: more than 60,000 cattle, 2,000 horses and
mares and 20,000 sheep.

Mission San Antonio: Don José Abrego, administrator in 1833 and
1834; 10,000 cattle, 500 horses and mares, 10,000 sheep. There were 1,000
Indians at the mission.

The following is a list of the solid men of the department, anterior
to and after the change of government.

Francisco P. Pacheco: Ranchos San Felipe and San Luis Gonzaga, about
90,000 acres of land; 20,000 cattle, 500 horses and mares and 15,000 sheep.
That rich hacendado was a large buyer of merchandise, and I sold many goods
to him in 1844 and 1845. He hauled the hides and tallow from his hacienda,
a distance of sixty miles, to the embarcadero of Santa Clara, now the town
of Alviso.

Feliciano Soberanes: Ranchos ex-Mission Soledad and San Lorenzo; 4,000
cattle, 2,000 sheep and 300 horses and mares. This land was the old Mission
Soledad and pursuant to the law of secularization was sold by order of
the government. After the arrival of a bishop in California, he called
on Señor Soberanes, who was ill at the time, and requested him to
give back to the Church the property above named—an advisable act, if he,
Soberanes, wanted to save his soul. The old hacendado replied to the reverend
father that he had decided to leave the land to his heirs and must decline
his request.

José Abrego, owner of the following ranchos: Punta Pinos, 1 league
of land, now the present site of Pacific Grove; Noche Buena, near the Hotel
Del Monte, 2 leagues; Saucito, 1 league; and San Francisquito, 3 leagues.
Those ranchos contained 4,000 cattle, 200 horses and mares and 2,000 sheep.

Andrés Pico: Ex-Mission San Fernando, 11 leagues of land; 5,000
cattle and 500 horses and mares. Some years after the secularization of
the mission of San Fernando, it became impoverished, and 121,620 acres
of its lands were granted to Eulogio de Célis; probably Pico became
a joint owner with him in the large tract.

To enumerate all the ranchos in the department, with the livestock on
them, would take too many pages. I have only mentioned, comparatively,
a few or some of the more important haciendas, to illustrate their great
wealth.

After their downfall, the missions became destitute and the lands were
granted by the authorities of the department to citizens of the young country.
Those men became stock raisers, and through the experience gained by their
observations of management by the fathers they succeeded in reinstating
the lost riches of California which were taken from the missionaries; and
they even accumulated more than twofold the former wealth of the primitive
land. They became extensive hacendados and were inspired by the numerous
evidences around them, which remained only as monuments that were fast
crumbling away, of the energy, perseverance and industry of the good fathers
in their days of plenty and their acquisition of property.

I may have alluded before to the facts contained in the statement, which
leads me to make the assertion, without fear of a successful contradiction,
that the department of California previous to and after the ruin of the
missions, in proportion to the population, was the richest of any country
under Spanish dominion and inhabited by citizens of Castilian extraction.

There were 1,045 grants of ranchos of all sizes made by the governors;
deducting from that number 245 (which it is presumed were not stocked with
animals) will leave 800 ranchos which were probably all stocked, averaging
1,500 head of cattle to each rancho and making a total of 1,200,000; this
was after the missions became poor. There are 87 haciendas above mentioned,
with an average of 5,310 cattle to each. When, in addition, the horses
and sheep are considered, surely no stronger proof of the assertion as
to the wealth of the department of California at that period could be either
required or produced.

Source: Davis, William Heath. Seventy-five Years
in San Francisco. 1929: San Francisco.